Silence
by SWGraysonPaladinOmniChick227
Summary: While injured and lost in space, Lance has a little time to think about the universe. Even if his head injury is making those thoughts a little strange, he manages to think of something quite profound. (Drabble.)


**Hey everyone! I know I've been gone a long time, and that's because I turned sixteen and sort of grew out of the stuff I used to write. To make up for such a long absence, here is a short drabble I wrote in January of 2018! It is one of my most popular fics on Amino and I hope you all will like it. It is NOT intended to be Klance and I ask that you try to refrain from interpreting it as such. The ship no longer appeals to me, and I have gravitated toward Sheith and Plance/Allurance. I may upload more works of mine in the future but for now, this is what you get! Enjoy!**

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Lance understood the vastness of space. He'd traversed so much of it and yet still he'd hardly made a dent in the great wide void that was the universe. It was, perhaps, conceivable that it went on forever, far beyond what could ever be explored; the Garrison believed so at least. Hundreds upon billions of light years, in no matter what direction you turned, you could always keep going, and there was even a chance you could go on in that direction for days without a single sign of sentient life.

What he hadn't considered, however, was how quiet it really was.

Sure, he knew no sound traveled in space; it had been drilled into his head at school. But in his time living in the Castle of Lions, he'd been stunned at the lack of true, pure, empty silence. Constant sounds always broke through the quiet. Buzzing machines, blaring alarms, even the clanging of Keith's sword against the scepters of the gladiators, there was never any silence.

But here, drifting through open space alone in a disabled Lion, silence was abundant. It carried an almost sacred aura and he dared not speak or move for fear of breaking it. He breathed quietly and slowly, conserving the rapidly thinning air of Blue's cockpit. The soft sound of his blood dripping from his head onto the thigh of his armor was the only thing reminding him that time was still passing. The pain in his head had reduced to a dull throbbing, the large gash on his temple stinging like a papercut drenched in lemonade.

He supposed this did give him time to think at least.

He was quite unused to the quiet of open space. Back home there had always been noisy children screaming and laughing or whining about one thing or another. Whether those children be Lance and his siblings, his cousins, his nieces and nephews, or whatever friends he or his family had over at the time.

He wondered what it was like now. Was it quiet without him? Was the house too deep in mourning to be noisy? Or perhaps they'd given up on him?

It occurred to him somewhere in the back of his mind that he was probably going to die out here. He had no idea if his crew knew he'd run into trouble (not that he knew what had happened) or if they were even coming to get him. He supposed they would have to though; there's no Voltron without the Blue Lion. But he knew that he himself was easily replaced along with any of the Paladins. They weren't one of a kind after all.

He wondered idly if suffocation or starvation would get him first, though once he ran out of air none of that would matter anyway. Alternatively, the Galra could find him, though Lance mused it was possible that would be worse than suffocating. Images of horrible, agonizing torture and pain flooded his vision and he shuddered.

But the Galra didn't know where he was either, so it was conceivable that he could simply drift here well after he died and no one would ever find him.

Within the thick silence, he was left to gaze out over the vast, empty darkness around him.

 _Did silence have a sound?_

The thought occurred to him suddenly with no warning or prompting at all and it was quite a shock to his fuzzy brain. It had, he supposed, been a valid question. Nothing could ever be truly silent. Not even the vastness of space, nor growing up deaf and unable to hear at all. Silence, like everything he knew, had a certain color about it. He could, if he closed his eyes, see the colors that came along with a lack of noise: blacks and grays, or whites and soft blues depending on why it was quiet; they flew through his mind even now as he pondered it. It had a smell, a certain scent that was nearly indescribable. It was akin to the smell of an empty beach where you could smell even the salt in the air, or a quiet, dense forest where so many different odors invaded your nostrils that a sense of calm overwhelmed you. It tasted like fresh air or like clean, cool tap water that has been filtered and chilled for a day, refreshing and almost sweet. It felt like thick fog or the first time he'd ever plunged beneath the surface of the ocean. But, he wondered, did it have a sound?

To any normal person, the answer of 'no' came quickly and easily. It was absurd! Silence is defined as a complete absence of sound; it sounded like nothing.

But Lance, light-headed and exhausted and just genuinely bored, took a moment to seriously consider the question. Sitting in an empty room alone, motionless as a stone, what did you hear? The logical answer was nothing. He knew that. But consider for a moment that you are alive while you are sitting in that room. Even lying still, your body would keep functioning, right? You would be able to hear the blood rushing in your head or the rumble of your stomach, or even your lungs as they drew in air.  
Aside from that, what else? What could you hear in dead silence?

 _ **Your mind.**_

Lance jolted at the sudden realization. As long as he'd been sitting here (since he woke up anyway,) he'd been thinking non-stop. Technically, he could hear himself thinking.  
Silence in itself, he decided, was a contradictory word. You could never say the word without breaking the very thing you are trying to convey. It didn't truly exist. It could never be truly silent in a room unless there was literally nothing there. No bacteria or machines or even a leaf. And then, no one would know about it.

 _The sound of silence…_

 _ **Was life.**_

And just as suddenly as the realization came, it was no longer silent. A voice crackled over his broken comm.

 _'L…ce. C…r…e?'_

A blurry red blob crossed his vision and he smiled sleepily. Leave it to Keith to break the silence.

And then true silence came for him. But he didn't really know that. By the time they picked him up, he'd passed out.

He told Shiro about his musings while he was resting the next morning, and the elder Paladin had been stunned by his maturity.  
Keith, on the other hand, just rolled his eyes and snorted at him before brutally kicking his butt on the training deck.

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 **Thank you for reading! I hope you all enjoyed.**

 **If I do write and post here in the future look forward to these fandoms!**

 **Ni No Kuni 2: The Revenant Kingdom**

 **Voltron**

 **She ra/The Dragon Prince (Possibly.)**

 **Boku No Hero Academia/My Hero Academia**

 **Marvel**

 **Again thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing your feedback! My writing has changed quite a bit since then but I have not written anything in months so I hope seeing feedback might spark my inspiration to continue! All unfinished works are now canceled, and I would actually be interested in giving the stories away to another user who may be able to do great things with them! Those stories are…**

 **Small Moments**

 **The North Wind**

 **Snapped**

 **I appreciate all of you!**

 **-Omni, now known as Tacoboi on most platforms.**


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